Friday, July 17, 2009

STEP Open House

This morning I went to an open house for the STEP course to see what the participants have achieved. The STEP course is for Papua New Guineans, teaching them how to teach literacy and prepare local language materials for their community. Two men from the Sos Kundi language are participating in this course.

At the open house this morning, I saw the books that the language groups had made and I spoke with the participants. There was one book that had animals in it and in the text, each animal made its animal noise, like 'woof' for a dog. The pig's noise was "Mmoo", but when the men said it, it didn't sound like the 'moo' a cow makes, it was more like the grunting sound that pigs make. They even had a sound for the noise that the sun makes! I have never heard the sun make a sound, but I guess in their culture, they believe that the sun says things like animals too.

Here are some of the books the Sos Kundi men made:

I don't understand much Sos Kundi, but the first two words on this page, 'wuna apa' mean 'my father'.

Me talking to a language group about one of their books. (Unfortunately the only photos with me in them were blurry!)